“... zealotry rule – a kind of tenth-reich Thatcherism. The heroine of Against a Dark Background, Lady Sharrow (‘I’m a fucking aristo, creep,’ she chides one underling who forgets her title), has been orphaned by Huhsz assassins. The Huhsz is a mixture of cult, multinational company, and clan, whose motives for wanting to go to any lengths to destroy ...”

“... fifty thousand came to pay tribute in the hall of the state Legislative Assembly. The first was a lady of 84, but most were young. Girls wrote his name across their foreheads and painted the colours of Brazil on their cheeks. President Franco, falling in the opinion polls five months before a presidential election and perhaps alarmed at the division that’s ...”

“... at the funeral service ‘his side-whiskers and the hair on his head were carefully cut off by his lady admirers’ – but it was finally achieved by Dostoevsky, in his famous speech at the ceremonies that accompanied the unveiling of the Pushkin statue in Moscow in 1880. Dostoevsky hijacked the poet for his own ideological ends. Unique among all the poets of ...”

“... like that accent. Please don’t come slouching near my bed again.’ So, real cool, I growled ‘Lady, no way you’ll walk right over me.’ Dead on. I chucked her then.                  ‘Waftage: An Irregular Ode’ The language flows as simply as blood from a wound, but how multifarious it is, borrowed and pieced together, now like a ...”

“... all the same. My best friend is a Copt.’ The day before we had given a lift to a wistful Coptic lady who had complained about discrimination. In my mood of dotty optimism and gratitude, I wanted Ahmed to be right. The Germans were asking him prying personal questions in English and discussing, in German, whether his hair was kinky or just curly. They seemed ...”

“... the great liner Queen Mary, which was almost as much a ‘constancy’ in the national life as the lady after whom the vessel was named: indeed, for years this majestic symbol of Britain’s recovery upstaged the Queen in the headlines. Anne Edwards makes no claim to have unearthed new sources. Matriarch is simply a refresher course in recent royal ...”

“... heightened her powers of observation. In English country society, ‘the men talk together; the lady of the house may be addressed once in a way as a duty – but they had rather talk together ... they have no notion that a lady’s conversation is better than a man’s.’ She was not used to such attitudes: ‘For some ...”

“... making them verse-offerings and penning whimsical letters. He flirted with female admirers such as Lady Austen: But when a Poet takes the pen Far more alive than other men He feels a gentle tingling come Down to the finger and the thumb Deriv’d from Nature’s noblest part ... This was as near as his timidity ever allowed him to come to an erection. In ...”

“... There was some clutching, a side-table was knocked over and a curl escaped from under the lady’s lace cap. The man hadn’t decided how to arrange his features before the situation was at an end. The lady maintained an air of gloomy consternation throughout. The girl in the outdoor pair is petite, and her ...”

“... whom you hardly know. You have strong feelings but they should be turned towards Our Lord and Our Lady.’ By the end of 1930 the Monday visits came to an end, but there were a few more meetings in church and even a few more drawings pressed into Véra’s unwilling hands. Véra promised that she would always pray for Gwen and Gwen retired to her shed, to ...”

“... of a safer place for Radji. But even here he comes under fire. Sitting next to him is the doughty Lady Bowker: ‘I hate the Shah, Radji, I hate him.’ Toppling monarchs seem subject to a special kind of cartographic derangement: their world map is made up only of monarchies, all of them dominoes. The most acute sufferer from tunnel royal vision would seem ...”

“... called ‘Thyrza’. Yet truly catastrophic figures in the unfolding drama of Byron’s life, like Lady Caroline Lamb, Annabella Milbanke (the poet’s wife), and Augusta, come and go in the book with great rapidity; when they do appear they figure not primarily for their own sakes and in their own right, but more as knowers or not-knowers, as divulgers or ...”

“... else saw her being picked up off the pavement outside the Arts Council. At a French Embassy party Lady Gladwyn saw her sink to the floor. Clark was there with his daughter and said: ‘Mamma’s fallen down.’ They both laughed a little, presumably to hide their embarrassment, a state of mind with which Clark must have been familiar since Jane was said to ...”

“... be found to mitigate a flagrant miscarriage of justice, and thus make some restitution to an old lady whose courage, dignity and faith in her husband’s innocence have never ...”

“... quality. Lodge is capable of writing a routine sentence – ‘In the meantime, the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover gave a great impetus to the onset of the Permissive Society’ – and of dropping a critical issue just when it gets difficult. He says, for instance, that it’s ‘very important to decide whether Capote’s “Handcarved ...”